This seems to me a reasonable comment on the Islamic connection to the 9/11 events. The view that Islam is the Devil's mockery of Christianity also seems theologically defensible to me

A FLORIDA church was yesterday promoting an event where it will burn copies of the Koran to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the U.S. In the announcement on its Facebook page, The Dove World Outreach Center of Gainesville, Florida, asked other religious groups to join in standing "against the evil of Islam. Islam is of the devil!"

The Facebook event has received more than 1,500 "Like" recommendations by users, but had also been attacked with a number of threatening messages posted on the page and corresponding anti-Islam rants.

The church's pastor, Terry Jones - who has written a book titled "Islam is of The Devil" and sells T-shirts bearing the same message - defended the controversial event. "Islam and Sharia law was responsible for 9/11," Jones told Agence France-Presse. "We will burn Korans because we think it's time for Christians, for churches, for politicians to stand up and say no; Islam and Sharia law is not welcome in the U.S. "We've got many death threats from jihad groups, but we cannot react by fear and we cannot compromise our beliefs. Somebody must stand up."

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) called for the church to cancel the event, The Christian Post reported. "It sounds like the proposed Koran burning is rooted in revenge," NAE president Leith Anderson said. "Yet the Bible says that Christians should ‘make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else.'"

Mainstream Muslim groups also denounced the move and lamented the sentiments promoted by the Gainesville church.

"Unfortunately in [Florida] and nationwide, Islamophobia are actually on the rise," Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesman Ramsey Kilic told AFP. "I'm more afraid of those who have anti-Muslim sentiments and may think this is a legitimate action and may want to attack a mosque or attack a Muslim on the street," he added.

However, Kilic said, "we are not taking any action to avoid this... we don't want to give attention to this, because that's what they want."

This is an old, old claim about the destructive effects of nutrient runoff from those evil Queensland farms -- but the reef is still there

SEAWEED is choking the Great Barrier Reef and killing coral, new research has found. Scientists in one of the largest studies of water quality pollution on the reef yesterday revealed the shock impact on the $1 billion-a-year tourism drawcard.

Poor water quality on the reef due to run-off, nutrients and high turbidity was increasing the amount of seaweed and reducing biodiversity of corals, the study found.

Hot spots include the inshore reef north of the Burdekin River and the entire Wet Tropics zone from Townsville to Port Douglas.

"Seaweeds are a natural part of the reef," said Australian Institute of Marine Science coral reef ecologist Dr Katharina Fabricius. "But what we don't want is billions of algae smothering coral. "Choking is a loaded term but when seaweed abundance becomes too high there is no space left for coral to grow."

The study has just been published in the authoritative scientific journal Ecological Applications. It used data collated from 150 reefs and at more than 2000 water quality stations across the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park since 1992.

Principal investigator Dr Glenn Death said seaweed cover increased fivefold under poor water quality. "The diversity of corals was also affected, decreasing in poor water quality," he said. "Currently, the water on 22 per cent of reefs - about 647 reefs - on the Great Barrier Reef does not meet water quality guidelines."

The study predicts that if water quality was improved in these areas, seaweed would be reduced by more than one-third and the number of coral species would bounce back by 13 per cent.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park extends 2000km along the northeast Australian coast and covers 345,000sq km.

Reading the scholarly work of Woodrow Wilson is an educational experience. It is shocking to read the expressions of his disaffection for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern liberalism lie in an assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Obamacare represents something like the full flowering of modern liberalism.

Wilson's expressions of disapproval are the precursor to Barack Obama's disdain for the Constitution and the Warren Court. Obama perfectly reflected Wilson's views in his 2001 comments on the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court. In the course of the famous radio interview Obama gave to WBEZ in Chicago, Obama observed that the Warren Court had not broken "free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties." To achieve "redistributive change," the limitations of the Constitution would have to be overcome by the Court or by Congress.

Franklin Roosevelt touted welfare state liberalism in the "second Bill of Rights" that he set forth to Congress in his 1944 State of the Union Address. "Necessitous men are not free men," Roosevelt asserted, and enumerated a new set of rights, among which were the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right of every family to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

Implicitly arguing that the teaching of the Declaration had become obsolete, Roosevelt asserted: "In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed."

The economic "rights" asserted by Roosevelt in his second Bill of Rights differ and conflict with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They are claims on the liberty of others. If I have a right to medical care, you must have a corresponding duty to supply it. If I have a right to a decent home, you must have a duty to provide it.

The argument for the welfare state belongs in the same family as "the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden."

Lincoln memorably derided the underlying principle as "the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it."

William Voegeli's Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State is one of the books of the year. George Will drew attention to Voegeli's book in his excellent column "The danger of a government with unlimited power." Michael Lind attacks Will and comes to the defense of liberalism. William Voegeli strikes back in "Why liberalism is dangerous." Voegeli has reignited a profoundly important argument that ultimately requires us to recover a basic understanding of limited constitutional government.

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard has taken a battering in the latest opinion poll which shows the Coalition would win the election if it was held now.

Support for both Ms Gillard and Labor has fallen dramatically while the Opposition has taken the lead in the Nielsen poll that was published in Fairfax newspapers on Saturday.

The Coalition is now ahead of Labor on a two-party preferred basis - 52 per cent to 48 per cent, a 6 percentage point swing against the Government since the last Nielsen poll a week ago. Labor's primary vote has plummeted 6 points to 36 per cent while the Coalition's primary vote has risen 4 points to 45 per cent, the poll shows. Ms Gillard's popularity has even fallen among women, with her 58-42 lead over Mr Abbott narrowing to 49-51.

Her approval rating fell 5 points to 51 per cent and her disapproval rating rose 6 points to 39 per cent. Mr Abbott's approval rose 6 points to 49 per cent and his disapproval dropped 6 points to 45 per cent. On the question of preferred prime minister, Ms Gillard's 21-point lead plummeted by 13 points to 49-41.

On a positive note for the Government, 69 per cent believe it will win the election while only 21 per cent back the Coalition.

Meanwhile, Ms Gillard has been accused of sending a former bodyguard and junior staff member to attend highly sensitive security meetings on her behalf.

In another damaging leak for Labor, sources have reportedly told The Weekend Australian that when Ms Gillard was deputy prime minister she regularly failed to attend cabinet's national security committee meetings. It's reported that she sent staffer Andrew Stark in her place.

A spokesman for Ms Gillard told the newspaper that Cabinet confidentiality meant she could not defend herself against the allegations.

Former Coalition foreign minister Alexander Downer said Ms Gillard's reported behaviour was scandalous. "The NSC takes decisions on life and death and is no place for a junior staffer," he said. "Such actions are scandalous."

Should the Gillard government be re-elected, the boatpeople issue will continue to plague it and Labor's internal divisions will come much more strongly to the fore.

There is no equivalence between Gillard's proposed regional processing centre in East Timor and Abbott's proposed centre on Nauru. For a start, the geography is radically different. No one will intentionally sail to Nauru. It's just too far away.

Secondly, its purpose is designed to prevent people-smugglers from being able to achieve for their clients the ultimate prize: permanent residency in Australia. It is only about solving the Australian problem. Illegal immigrants would be sent there and processed. They would be treated humanely and all their human rights observed. They would be free to go to any country that would have them, or free at any time to go home. Of course there is a small element of semi-bluff. If the boats stopped absolutely, then a future Abbott government might decide, as the Howard government did, to exercise a special act of generosity and allow some of the people to come to Australia. But that would only be after some years, and after the boats had absolutely stopped.

At the same time, an Abbott government would institute temporary protection visas without family reunion rights. Despite the braying and self-regarding protests of the Malcolm Frasers and Julian Burnsides and others in their camp, TPVs are completely consistent with the 1951 Refugee Convention. According to a recent speech by UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, there are about 16 million refugees today. The vast majority of these will not be resettled anywhere, but will ultimately go home. Temporary protection is the norm.

A FIVE-year-old girl wrongly removed from her parents was denied a visit with her dying father, even after the Ombudsman ruled DOCS bungled the case. In a horror start to her life, the girl has suffered from cancer, lost her father and spent more than two years separated from her family because of decisions that should not have been made.

DOCS will be forced to pay compensation to the family of the Sydney girl, who had never been abused or neglected.

Community Services Minister Linda Burney was notified of the case in September and this month did not override her department's decision to prevent the girl from travelling to Taiwan for her father's funeral. Yesterday she said the case was before the court until February and that it was "inappropriate for me to intervene."

Deputy Ombudsman Steve Kinmond found the girl, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was removed after a DOCS case worker made "significant errors in her interpretation" of an interview with the girl's teenage sister.

DOCS wrongly and repeatedly told the Children's Court the teenager had claimed her brother had sexually abused her and that their mother had failed to act. Police were notified of the claims and never pursued action against the boy.

Mr Kinmond found the teenage girl's statements were "misconstrued when given to [the mother] and the Children's Court."

Errors repeated to government departments and in affidavits led to the mother being tagged as "non protective of children, unwilling to believe [her eldest daughter] and dishonest".

After her children were removed the mother admitted to disciplining her teenage daughter with a bamboo cane, leading to a conviction for assault.

Mr Kinmond found the errors were crucial in the removal of the woman's youngest child who had been diagnosed with a neuroblastoma and treated with chemotherapy when four months old.

His report was handed to DOCS on March 30 but just weeks later when the girl's father was dying of cancer, DOCS refused to let the girl's mother take her to Taiwan for his funeral. "DOCS has a hard job. I understand many children need to be removed. That was not the case here; it has been a total miscarriage of justice," Opposition Community Services spokeswoman Pru Goward said.

DOCS has offered an "unconditional apology" to the mother and wrote "it is clear information wrongly summarised from an interview was relied upon in court."

I was just intrigued or worried by a threatening letter that a Virginian boss of NAACP, a U.S. group promoting reverse racism, sent to James Webb, a Virginian Democratic senator who has opposed affirmative action - maybe more openly than his former G.O.P. opponent, George Allen.

A week ago, Webb wrote a WSJ op-ed, Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege, in which he was advocating the end of affirmative action programs.

The intimidating tone of the NAACP reply sucks. They want to meet him and they ask him whether there are any more rotten apples around him so that they could go after their necks, too. I think that beyond a certain threshold, such communication of organized groups with the politicians has to be viewed as blackmailing.

I suppose this is better than nothing but it is a disgrace that nobody has been held responsible for killing the guy. Surely a charge of negligence could be made to stick, if not manslaughter. It should have gone to a jury instead of being prejudged. Just more West Australian corruption

THE family of an Aboriginal elder who died of heat stroke in the back of a prison transfer van have been awarded a $3 million ex-gratia compensation. The ex-gratia payment comes on top of the $200,000 interim payment they received. The West Australian Attorney-General Christian Porter today revealed the details of the compensation payment, Perth Now reported.

Mr Ward, an elder whose full name cannot be used for cultural reasons, died of heat stroke in the back of the van on the way from Laverton to Kalgoorlie in WA's Goldfields region in January 2008.

Late in June WA's Director of Public Prosecutions Joe McGrath visited Mr Ward's widow Nancy at Warburton in the Central Desert and told her charges would not be laid over his death.

This year there was a predictable amount of hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of “the pill.” Many pundits told us that the pill had delivered as promised: Women had become liberated. Sex in the City! Sex in dorm rooms! Sex behind bleachers! Women have it all.

But wait. Now comes word that women aren’t all that interested in sex any more. Their libidos are waning to the point that pharmaceutical companies are racing to find a Pink Viagra: a new pill; a pill that will restore the desire to have the sex that the pill made possible.

He may be a bit thick himself -- as he seems to ignore the importance of home background. Families who pay for their kid's education are probably more involved in it and make sure their kid does the hard yards

'Rich thick kids' end up overtaking 'poor clever children' at school, Michael Gove said yesterday. The Education Secretary complained that success at school is still too closely linked to children's family background. Privately educated Mr Gove said a ' yawning gap' had opened up between the attainment of poorer youngsters and their wealthier peers.

But last night head teachers' leaders protested at the use of the word 'thick' by a cabinet minister. Mick Brookes, of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: 'Thick is not a word that is currently in use in schools. It is demeaning to children.'

"Doctors should call people "fat" rather than "obese" to make it clear that they needed to lose weight, a British health minister said on Wednesday.

Anne Milton, a Conservative, said the term "obese" distanced people from the problem and that calling them fat would encourage "personal responsibility". She said many National Health Service professionals were worried that if they called people "fat" they might cause offence but she insisted that anyone with such a weight problem needed to know.

Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, which campaigns to raise awareness of the health problems of being overweight, accused Mrs Milton of scientific ignorance. "The word 'obese' is a medical description of a weight that is such it might dispose someone to medical problems," he said. "The word 'fat' is a stigmatising word that is the kind children use to insult each other.

Multiple examples below. Police no doubt fear public outrage if the true extent of lawlessness became known

ATTEMPTED assaults on three women in one day and less than 1km from where a woman was abducted and raped have been kept secret by police. The incidents happened within hours of each other close to Queens Park, in the Eastern Suburbs, the scene of a horrific April 29 attack by two men that only became public after the victim spoke to The Daily Telegraph. Despite three similar incidents in one day - July 6 - police did not make them public.

Will a hotter world lead to more intense storms [As Warmists regularly predict]?

2010 might be on track to be the warmest ever (according to GISS), but right now, we may be about to set a new record of tropical storms — in inactivity. Ryan Maue tracks the global accumulated activity and reports that by the end of July we might break the record low we set last year.

Ryan N. Maue’s 2010 Global Tropical Cyclone Activity Update: "July 15: If no additional ACE occurred in July, the 24-month global ACE total would be 1095 compared to last month at 1173. The previous 30-year low was 1091 set recently in September 2009. No lower values exist during the past 30-years.

Global and Northern Hemsiphere Tropical Cyclone Activity is near a record low

Looking at the National Hurricane Centre, it doesn’t seem like there is much activity on the way between now and the end of July.

Advisories issued for the North Atlantic, The East Pacific, The West Pacific, and the Indian Ocean are all the same: There is no tropical storm activity for this region.

William Hague was last night plunged into a row over new ­Foreign Office rules which ban white males from gaining work experience at his department. The Foreign Secretary was challenged to explain why his ­official work placement schemes specifically ban white, middle-class males from applying for the £367-a-week positions.

Under the tightly-drawn rules, only women, people from ethnic ­minorities and the ­disabled are ­entitled to apply for a chance to work at one of the great offices of state.

The placements give students a head start in the battle to win ­coveted jobs in the diplomatic service and possibly rise through the ranks to become an ambassador.Only one category of non-minority male applicants stand a chance – those whose families are poor enough to entitle them to qualify for a full student maintenance grant.

The bizarre ‘middle-class male’ ban came to light after Tory MP Dominic Raab was contacted by an irate ­constituent who tried to obtain work experience at the department.

The recent Wikileaks activity is obviously a big free speech issue so I present below two more or less opposing views of what is involved. Rather amusingly, both come from Left-leaning sources

The WikiLeaks war logs change everything

“Whatever our keepers of intelligence secrets do know, and whatever abuses they’ve done to our civil liberties to learn them, they must feel less sure today about keeping it all contained. When that many people have access to information, however compartmentalized their bosses may think they’ve made the system, some of it will get out, which leads to something else we should worry about. …

The WikiLeaks war diary will absolutely spur our powerful institutions to look for increasingly draconian ways to clamp down on how we share information. What WikiLeaks represents is what governments and corporations fear: a threat to their cultures of secrecy and dominance in their domains.”

“Just because some documents are classified doesn’t mean that they’re news or even necessarily interesting. A case in point is the cache of 92,000 secret documents about the Afghanistan war that someone leaked to WikiLeaks, which passed them on to the New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, and Der Spiegel in Germany. All three published several of these documents — presumably the highlights — in today’s editions.

Some of the conclusions to be drawn from these files: Afghan civilians are sometimes killed. Many Afghan officials and police chiefs are corrupt and incompetent. Certain portions of Pakistan’s military and intelligence service have nefarious ties to the Taliban. If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today’s must be the first one you’ve read.”

I am inclined to share the concerns of the first article: That a crackdown designed to prevent further leaks may imperil free speech generally. Whether any such legislation would get past SCOTUS is another matter, however. Their decisions are pretty unpredictable but they have lately leant towards protecting free speech.

These are a dime a dozen in Britain but are much less common in Australia. These "her word against his" prosecutions should never proceed in the first place. Females are quite good at lying and often do. When they are caught out they should face the same jail sentence that the man would have got

A MAN'S business and reputation are tainted, a young woman's HSC and mental health are in tatters and prosecutors have been ordered to pay more than $30,000 in legal costs for a bungled rape investigation on Sydney's northern beaches.

But it could have been worse still, if not for the trove of secrets stored in one of the world's most popular mobile phones. In what may be the first time an iPhone's elephantine memory has saved someone accused of a serious crime, deleted data retrieved by a leading surveillance expert appears to have led to the dropping of five rape charges against a Sydney man.

Don't scoff at those lucky rabbit feet. New research indicates that having some kind of "lucky" token can actually improve your performance by increasing your selfconfidence.

"I watch a lot of sports, and I read about sports, and I noticed that very often athletes also famous athletes hold superstitions," said Lysann Damisch of the University of Cologne in Germany.

New research shows that having some kind of "lucky" token can actually improve your performance by increasing your selfconfidence. Above, a necklace with traditional goodluck tokens.

Michael Jordan wore his college team shorts underneath his NBA uniform for good luck; Tiger Woods wears a red shirt on tournament Sundays, usually the last and most important day of a tournament.

"I was wondering, why are they doing so?" Damisch hypothesized that a belief in superstition might help people do better by improving their confidence. With colleagues Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler, also of the university, she designed a set of experiments to see if activating people's superstitious beliefs would improve their performance on memory and dexterity games.

In one of the experiments, volunteers were told to bring a lucky charm with them. Then the researchers took it away to take a picture. People brought in all kinds of items, from old stuffed animals to wedding rings to lucky stones. Half of the volunteers were given their charm back before the test started; the other half were told there was a problem with the camera equipment and they would get it back later.

Volunteers who had their lucky charm did better at a computer memory game, and other tests showed that this difference was because they felt more confident, she said. They also set higher goals for themselves.

Just wishing someone good luck with "I press the thumbs for you," the German version of crossing your fingers improved volunteers' success at a task that required manual dexterity, the scientists reported. The findings are published in the research journal Psychological Science.

Of course, even Michael Jordan lost basketball games sometimes. "It doesn't mean you win, because of course winning and losing is something else," said Damisch. "Maybe the other person is stronger."

IS IT just me? A report says that nasty global warming is to blame for. . . wait for it. . . making yellow-bellied marmots bigger. Seeing as these critters live in America, I'm surprised it's not all BP's fault.

According to Dr Arpat Ozgul, a biologist at London's Imperial College, the wee furry beasts are larger because extra hot weather means they've more time to grow.

That's all very well, except I remember that, only last year, we were warned that Scottish sheep on remote St Kilda were getting smaller. Because of global warming.

You can get anything you like out of a climate model. It is just a patchwork of guesses and leaves out lots of influential factors. Just alter one assumption (e.g. the effect of clouds) and the answers can change dramatically

According a new computer model, a total of nearly seven million additional Mexicans could emigrate to the U.S. by 2080 as a result of reduced crop yields brought about by a hotter, drier climate—assuming other factors influencing immigration remain unchanged.

"The model shows that climate-driven refugees could be a big deal in the future," said study co-author Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Using data on Mexican emigration as well as climate and crop yields in 30 Mexican states between 1995 and 2005, Oppenheimer and colleagues created the computer model to predict the effect of climate change on the rate of people crossing the border.

In that ten-year period, 2 percent of the Mexican population emigrated to the U.S. for every 10 percent reduction in crop yield.

Using the model to extrapolate this real-world figure over the next 70 years, the researchers calculated that 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans—a number roughly equal to 10 percent of Mexico's current adult population—could migrate to the U.S. by 2080.

The research is one of the first attempts by scientists to put hard numbers on how climate change can affect human migration patterns.

"Our study is the first to build a model that can be used for projecting the effects on migration of future climate change," Oppenheimer said.

Global Warming Study "a Simplification"

Though the new global warming study is "original and very interesting," it shouldn't be interpreted as a forecast of what will happen, economist Ian Goldin, who wasn't involved in the project, said via email.

"The [end of the] time range—2080—is a very long time off, and there are many other factors [besides climate change] which may lead to a very different outcome," said Goldin, director of the University of Oxford's James Martin 21st Century School.

Barry Smit, a climate-impact scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, agreed.

"I wouldn't take these numbers to the bank," said Smit, who also wasn't involved in the research, which is published in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To reach their conclusions, the authors had to make some "heroic assumptions," Smit said, such as that the current economic and political situations of the U.S. and Mexico won't change for decades.

Study co-author Oppenheimer acknowledged there are many uncertainties in his team's model. But it's important for scientists to investigate climate change-induced migration quantitatively, he said.

"This is the first time anybody's built a model to do this," Oppenheimer said. "It's a simplification, and there are a lot of assumptions, but it's the start of a learning process. As we learn more, the model will improve, and the numbers will get more reliable."

Lefty blogger Kevin Drum comes out with a half-hearted attempt to explain that, no, he doesn't hate conservatives, he just doesn't understand them! And he oh so dearly wants to understand them, he's just having trouble getting his enlightened mind around the idea! How very nice of Mr. Drum:

On an intellectual level, I can sort of get this. If I were a conservative Christian I'd be unhappy with the increasing secularization of society and the 60s-era Supreme Court decisions that largely removed it from the public square. If I were a white guy stuck in a sucky job and heard stories of blacks being given preference in promotions and school placements, I'd be pissed. If I were socially traditional and my school district insisted on a curriculum that endorsed tolerance of gay lifestyles, I'd be horrified. If I only heard the Fox News version of Climategate, it would seem like truly terrifying proof of a massive global conspiracy and fraud.

Or, in other words, "If I were a racist sexist homophobic paranoid, I could totally understand conservatism. But I'm not any of those things, so I can't possibly understand why anyone would be a conservative!"

Say it with me now: the ideology of conservatism can completely and seamlessly be divorced from racism, sexism, whatever -ism the Left accuses us of, while still being intellectually coherent and logical. This is the worst kind of elitism.

That talk of a "sucky" job is typical Leftist contempt for the lives of ordinary people. I know many people in very ordinary work who are happy in that work. My late father was one -- and I'll vouch that he was a 10 times greater gentleman than Kevin Drum will ever be -- JR

Queensland speech laws are rarely enforced so this is something of a surprise. Obviously there are limits to tolerance of nastiness

"The woman believed to have created an abusive Facebook hate page aimed at 22-year-old Sunshine Coast murder victim Justine Jones was today charged by Gympie detectives.

The 22-year-old local woman was charged with using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend in relation to alleged postings on Internet sites and social networking sites around July 17 - an offence punishable by up to three years imprisonment.

She is due to appear in Gympie Magistrates Court on August 2.

The woman, who is believed to have used the fake name Wendy Woods, allegedly boasted online about her “achievement” of having the Justine Jones hate page mentioned in the media, and described herself as a “troll”, a person who defaces internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families and is connected with a group of other trolls who cause havoc on memorial websites.

This is a bit too speculative to hang your hat on but the evidence that early humans survived an ice age only in Southern South Africa is at least interesting.

Southern South Africa is quite close to the Antarctic so should, on simplistic assumptions, have been at least as deadly an environment as icecapped Europe and North Africa.

On the other hand, the Warmists have never been able to show warming in the Southern hemisphere of our day so it is not entirely surprising that climate change was not symmetrical between the hemispheres in the past: Maybe it has never been "global".

The Southern hemisphere has a lot more ocean so that could be a moderating influence. Go South, young man!

A STRIP of land on Africa's southern coast became a last refuge for the band of early humans who survived an ice age that wiped out the species elsewhere, scientists maintain.

The land, referred to by researchers as "the garden of Eden," may have been the only part of Africa to remain continuously habitable during the ice age that began about 195,000 years ago.

Blonde one-time barmaid Rebecca Docherty tried to avoid the cameras when she was named as the Liberal National Party candidate for the Queensland seat of Griffith last week. However, the 30-year-old dressed in head-to-heels designer clothes for an article in Grazia magazine, which hits newstands today.

"I have champagne tastes on a beer budget. I used to buy the glossy magazines just to look at the pictures," she said. "I love high fashion but I can't afford it."

Ms Docherty's flamboyant campaigning style contrasts with Mr Rudd's more down-to-earth, intellectual and sometimes "boring" style but she is unlikely to unseat him. Mr Rudd holds Griffith, the safest Labor seat in Queensland, by a margin of 12.4 per cent. He is expected to retain the seat.

Ms Docherty said she was underwhelmed by the appointment of Ms Gillard as Australia's first female leader. "I'd never want to be judged on my gender," she said. "I'd want to be judged on whether I'm good at what I do."

A QANTAS airliner has been forced to turn back to Sydney after its de-icing equipment failed mid-air. Flight QF922 to Cairns was forced to turn around about 90 minutes into the flight, a Qantas spokeswoman said.

The plane's de-icing equipment failed, prompting the captain to turn the 737-800 around and land at Sydney Airport.

"We had a minor technical fault with one of our aircraft which affects the icing equipment,'' the spokeswoman said. "It was inadvisable to operate the aircraft in the icy conditions. "Under normal fine-weather conditions, it would not affect the operation of the aircraft.''

After landing, the affected passengers were transferred to another plane.

A very weird decision. The plane would have been just about over Brisbane when the problem was noticed. Why did they not land immediately at Brisbane instead of risking the long flight back to Sydney? Very strange indeed. Brisbane is a busy and advanced modern airport. There was absolutely no reason to land anywhere else.

They actually flew INTO more icy conditions than they would have encountered if they had simply continued on their way. Brisbane is subtropical and Cairns is tropical. Sydney is neither. Only completely robotic bureaucratic decision-making can explain such dangerous actions. I hope we hear more of this

Most of the progressive criticism of the Obama Democrats seems to take-on one of either a couple different themes. First, there’s the theme that “Obama should have focused more on job creation” during his first two years in office, rather than spending so much time and energy on healthcare legislation. Progressive pundit Arianna Huffington has been sounding this alarm for at least the last nine months, recognizing before many others that, yes, even Barack Obama needs to preside over a flourishing economy if he’s going to retain any political clout.

The other theme of criticism among progressives is that “Obama hasn’t gone far enough.” His approach to “reforming” healthcare should have been to completely shut-down any private sector involvement in the healthcare industry and the medical profession, and to place it all under the auspices of government-run enterprise. Similarly, he should have put “big oil” in its place by now, and should have already legislated a reduction in petroleum consumption while “creating” a “green energy industry.”

Both of these lines of reasoning are fraught with naivety, and false assumptions. And they are both grounded in a enormous misunderstanding of basic economics, and human nature.

Australia's immigration levels are unsustainable and will be slashed under a coalition government, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says. The coalition would cut the annual migrant intake from the current level of 300,000 to 170,000 in its first term of government, he said. "Three hundred thousand is just not sustainable," Mr Abbott told reporters in Canberra on Sunday.

The plan was separate from the asylum seeker issue. Mr Abbott said skilled migration programs would continue. "We will maintain, though, various employer-nominated categories because it's important that business has the skills as a people that it needs," he said.

A senior judge was under investigation yesterday after being accused of making anti-Semitic remarks in court that may have swayed his jury into acquitting a group of protesters.

Judge George Bathurst-Norman was said by critics to have persuaded a jury to clear a group of campaigners who smashed up a factory making parts for Israeli warplanes. Summing up in the criminal damage trial, he compared Israel to the Nazi regime and accused the country of ignoring international law. The judge added that 'there may be much to be admired' about the chief protester, and that 'in the last war he would probably have received a George Medal'.

The Office for Judicial Complaints, which deals with objections over the conduct of judges and magistrates, confirmed that an inquiry into how Judge Bathurst-Norman handled the trial of five political activists at Hove Crown Court in June is under way.

Cowardice is now officially encouraged, and even compulsory. That is still no excuse for the worm described below, however.

A choking diner died after a paramedic refused treatment because he feared for his own safety. Builder John Kinder began to gasp for breath as his frantic friend Frank Honey pushed away staff who had rushed to Mr Kinder's aid.

When an ambulance arrived, the paramedic told the restaurant manager in Manchester he wouldn't go inside - because Mr Honey, 65, was 'aggressive'. He waited for police to arrive ten minutes later - by which time Mr Kinder, 55, had suffered fatal brain damage.

First was the startling accusation by Attorney General Eric Holder, days after Barack Obama was inaugurated in a gusher of good feeling, that we are all "a nation of cowards" when it comes to facing issues of race. A real icebreaker for a national conversation.

Second was the instantaneous verdict of the president, when asked about the arrest of Harvard's Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge cop Sgt. James Crowley. With no knowledge of what happened, Obama blurted out that the cops had "acted stupidly." It took a White House beer summit to detoxify that one.

A third was the revelation that Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the "wise Latina" herself, had gone to extremes to see that the case of Frank Ricci and the New Haven, Conn., firefighters never got to the Supreme Court. Ricci and co-defendants had been denied promotions they had won in competitive exams solely because they were white and no black firemen had done as well.

The fourth was the Justice Department's dropping of charges against members of the New Black Panther Party, whose intimidation of voters in Philadelphia had been captured on tape. When a department official resigned in protest and went to the Civil Rights Commission to accuse officials at Justice of ordering staff attorneys not to pursue such cases, that explosive charge, too, was ignored by Justice.

Came then the NAACP smear that the tea party was harboring racists, which Joe Biden explicitly rejected on national television on Sunday, before the Monday firestorm over Sherrod.

Now, whatever one's views on each of these episodes in which race played a role, white Americans are being forced to address them. And, surely, the White House understands this is bad news for Obama and the Democratic Party.

For though the black community remains solidly behind Obama and the white majority is shrinking toward minority status by 2042 or 2050, depending on which Census survey one uses, whites in America still outnumber blacks five to one. And if forced constantly to come down on one side or the other of a racial divide, most folks will wind up with their own.

In past elections, Democrats have raised race -- allegations that black churches were being torched in the South, that George W. Bush's opposition to a hate crimes bill meant he was coldly indifferent to the dragging death of a handicapped black man -- to solidify and energize the minority vote. And, today, that vote remains solid behind Obama,

Where the erosion is taking place is in white America, among working- and middle-class folks who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries but took a chance with Obama in the fall. Now, every time some new incident erupts, these folks are being tarred.

Opposition to affirmative action is racist. Supporting the tea party gives aid and comfort to racists. Opposing health care puts you in league with folks who used racial slurs on Rep. John Lewis. To raise the issue of the New Black Panther Party is to play the race card.

One understand the bitterness of tea party folks who carry signs that read: "What difference does it make what this placard says. You'll call it racist anyway."

And this time it is not censorship from the government or Google that is the problem. The problem is a profit-hungry "legal gentleman". You can read about him here. He is buying up off newspapers the copyright to their back issues and looking for anybody who has reprinted any of the content concerned. He then threatens them with legal action for breach of copyright.

Needless to say, many bloggers are "offenders". Most of what bloggers put up would appear to be covered by the "Fair use" provisions of copyright law, however. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

Even if a blogger is in the right and is covered by "fair use", the prospect of a court case is of course intimidating and it appears that many have opted to pay the "legal gentleman" settlement money rather than go to court.

One of the blogs targeted is Clayton Cramer's Armed Citizen blog. So Clayton has just suspended the blog until the matter is finalized. He has also temporarily taken his main blog private so that only invited users (I am one) can see it. It has always been a good libertarian/conservative blog so it is a pity to see it no longer fully accessible.

Clayton is all fired up and even seems to think that he can get the lawyers in this scheme disbarred. He is certainly not surrendering. So wish him every success.

As I have the means to defend lawsuits, I myself would not be intimidated by a lawsuit so all my blogs will continue. The fact that I live in Australia would also probably cause the guy to go after easier prey.

A matter of concern, however, is that the bloghoster for my blogs may be buffaloed into shutting me down. So right now take a note of where the mirror sites of of my blogs are hosted. See here. If the main blog is shut down, the mirror sites will continue.

Actually, TONGUE-TIED and my GUN WATCH blog are probably not in any great peril as on both I usually publish only short excerpts that are clearly permitted under copyright law. On some of my other blogs, however, I do often reproduce full articles. So we shall see what we shall see.

Samoan man convicted of smashing a man's jaw for allegedly disrespecting his sister -- but no jail

A SAMOAN national has narrowly avoided being immediately sent to jail for smashing the jaw of a fast food worker who was "culturally disrespectful" toward his younger sister.

The Brisbane District Court was told Sanervie Sautia landed a single punch to the face KFC employee Robert Hirsch, 20, and breaking his jaw in two places at the fastfood chain's Inala store, 15km west of Brisbane, on April 16 last year.

Sautia, 23, was today sentenced two years' jail, but released on immediate parole, after pleading guilty to one count of grievous bodily harm.

Lawyers for Sautia argued it was considered unacceptable in Samoan culture for a person to disrespect or insult a woman. Barrister Tim Ryan said his client "never intended" to harm Mr Hirsch, but confronted casual KFC employee over having called his sister a "f***head.’’ "In the Samoan culture it is unacceptable to disrespect females," Mr Ryan said.

The court was told Mr Hirsch allegedly made the "insulting" remark while working with Sautia's sister - also then employed by KFC.

Prosecutor Rob Glenday said Mr Hirsch had been sitting on the KFC store's loading dock, on a break, when he was approached by Sautia about 2.30pm. Mr Glenday said Sautia confronted Mr Hirch saying: "What's you name bro? So you was the one going off at my sister."

Mr Hirsch replied: "No way." The court was told Sautia told Mr Hirsch to never "f***ing talk to my sister like that" and punched him once in the face.

Mr Glenday said Mr Hirsch was later taken to hospital and required surgery to insert three metal plates, to secure his jaw, and 35 internal and two-external stitches. Mr Hirch was forced to "eat through a straw" for numerous weeks after the attack, the court was told. "(This was a) mindless act of aggression against (Mr Hirsch) while he was sitting down at work," he said.

Judge Richard Jones, in sentencing Sautia, said the attack may have been triggered by a cultural "slight", but that it was an unacceptable act of violence.

"It is a most serious offence and is all too prevalent in society today," Judge Jones said. "(Mr Hirsch) worked with your sister at the Kentucky Fried Chicken premises ... and insulted your sister ... using coarse language. "It appears among Samoan culture ... to insult a woman is a significant slight indeed. "It may provide an explanation, but no excuse."

A Tory minister has provoked fury with an astonishing declaration that taxpayers should fund comedy workshops and party nights for prisoners. Crispin Blunt also set out how he planned to scrap harsh indefinite sentences for the country's most depraved criminals.

The prisons minister was immediately accused of damaging the Conservatives' reputation as the party of law and order.

Mr Blunt revealed he had overturned a ban on publicly funded jollies for prisoners - brought in following condemnation of a horror-themed fancy dress party for women inmates, including seven convicted killers.

The restriction, which explicitly ruled out events likely to outrage the public, had also been a response to revelations that an Al Qaeda terrorist was given lessons on how to be a stand-up comic while at a high-security prison. But Mr Blunt branded the guidance, introduced in 2008, 'damaging and daft' and revoked it.

He also indicated an end to sentences which allow judges to lock up indefinitely thousands of the country's worst offenders - including rapists, paedophiles and murderers. Known as Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection - or IPPs - they ensure the worst criminals are kept behind bars for life unless they prove that they are no longer a threat to the public.

However, Mr Blunt said too many IPP sentences, brought in under Labour, were handed out, adding that locking people up and throwing away the key was 'not the answer'.

The disturbing moves follow the announcement by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke that thousands of offenders will be given community sentences instead of short jail terms.

Former Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who introduced the ban on unacceptable events, condemned the impact on victims and said the law-abiding public would be 'incredulous'.

Shrinkwrapped is a very thoughtful blog by a conservative-oriented psychoanalyst in New York. From recollection, the author is Jewish. It is a generally very good blog well worth reading for those of us who are particularly interested in the psychology of politics -- which is my field of academic research.

Recently, Glenn Reynolds linked to an article by Roddy Boyd ("Killing Jews For Fun and For Profit: The Continuing American Adventures of Arab Bank") documenting a court case against an Arab Bank which illustrates how even supposedly rational and reasonable institutions, once in thrall to antisemitism, end up behaving irrationally and self destructively. Shrinkwrapped has responded with an article titled "Anti-Semitism as Thought Disorder".

To be a little crass about it, Shrinkwrapped argues that antisemitism sends you mad. That argument is of course not a new one. There are several versions of it and "The authoritarian personality" version of 1950 is perhaps the best known.

It is however basically an "armchair" theory. As far as I can tell, the people putting it forward have little if any personal knowledge of actual antisemites. For some reason, however, I have always had the compulsion to test theory against reality -- which usually does nothing for my popularity. And much of my research career was devoted to testing inferences derived from "The authoritarian personality" theory.

Readers who know my skeptical stance on global warming and health science will not be surprised to hear that I regularly found inferences from the theory not to be supported by the data.

And one of the things I did was to apply the characteristic methodology of anthropology to an examination of antisemitism. Anthropologists have the view that you can never understand a group "from the outside" -- You have to join the group and become accepted into it before you will ever have any chance of understanding it. I did that with the neo-Nazi group in my city. In other words I got out of my armchair and had a close-up look at what I was talking about. My resultant observations were published in The Jewish Journal of Sociology.

And what I found was actually something extremely common -- perfectly normal sane people who had just got hold of a wrong theory -- not unlike most Global Warmists today and not unlike the hordes of grade school teachers who think that just looking at words without any mention of phonics is a good way for kids to learn to read.

All three theories -- Jewish evil, global warming and "look and learn" have been catastrophic in different ways and illustrate the importance of getting your theories right. They also, sadly, illustrate the reluctance of people to let go of a theory they have accepted when confronted with evidence that the theory concerned is wrong.

Scientists are in fact some of the worst people at that. They cling to the theories of their youth through thick and thin and it is only the arising of a younger generation of scientists with more open minds that allows scientific thinking to advance.

So I disagree with Shrinkwrapped in seeing antisemites as being in some way psychologically abnormal. I think they are all too normal in fact. And it is precisely their normality which makes me despair of changing their views.

So in the end I am more pessimistic about antisemites than Shrinkwrapped is. He seems to think that psychological "help" could change their views whereas I doubt that anything will change their views. Israel can kill the antisemites that surround it but it will not change their minds.

Update

Shrinkwrapped has offered some polite comments on my post above. I am a bit amused by his heading. He uses the rare word "emended" -- which refers to minor textual corrections. But his post is much more extensive than that. In a nutshell, he says that antisemitism can drive a whole society mad even if all the individuals in it are sane.

That seems a stretch to me but I will think about it. I tend to agree with Margaret Thatcher's thoroughly conservative observation that there is no such thing as society, only individual people.

Obama's policies are a recipe for economic stagnation : Given present conditions there is no way that Obama's policies could restore full employment without cutting real wages. And surging inflation is the only means by which he can do that, assuming Americans would stand for it. Even if full employment was restored Obama's policies would suck the life out of the economy leaving the vast majority of Americans with little hope of bettering their lives The Australian economy is slowing, not accelerating : The Australian economy is not as healthy as it looks. Last October UBS economists predicted that the Australian economy would start accelerating in the second half of 2010. I was highly dubious then and more so now. Before long I expect certain economists to be eating crow, even if it will be in private Why capital gains taxes retard economic growth : Capital gains taxes erect a significant barrier to the movement of savings from old established companies to newer and more innovative enterprises. In fact, they become a tax on social mobility, as does a highly progressive income tax structure Don't believe the MSM when it says Cuba's prisons are emptying : The corrupt media are at it again. This time major outlets are covering up for Castro's Gulag. Instead of reporting on his victims these lying leftwing hacks are praising this sadistic thug for releasing a handful of political prisoners It's the savings that fuels economic growth - not government spending : Since early 2001 the US pool of funding has been subjected to the most vicious attack in the form of the aggressive lowering of interest rates. Yet despite all the monetary pumping and the aggressive lowering of interest rates the economy has continued to struggle Hating Jews :Jews worldwide are again under attack. The Holocaust and 6 million slaughtered Jews have been forgotten. It now appears that history is on the way to repeating itself, aided and abetted by the world press Where does oil really come from? It remains, however, only an article of faith that oil and natural gas are biological in origin; scientific proof is absent. Recently, information from the Gulf of Mexico has caused geologists to rethink the origins of these so-called fossil fuels

The federal government has censored approximately 90 per cent of a secret document outlining its controversial plans to snoop on Australians' web surfing, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws, out of fear it could cause "premature unnecessary debate".

The government has been consulting with the internet industry over the proposal, which would require ISPs to store certain internet activities of all Australians - regardless of whether they have been suspected of wrongdoing - for law enforcement agencies to access. All parties to the consultations have been sworn to secrecy.

Industry sources have claimed that the controversial regime could go as far as collecting the individual web browsing history of every Australian internet user, a claim denied by the Attorney-General Robert McClelland's spokesman.

They were responsible for four decades of murder and mayhem. And just two gangster families left taxpayers with a staggering £37million bill for their crimes, it was revealed yesterday.

The figure - almost £1million a year since their reign of terror began - is the cost to the public for detecting and punishing their offences. The families were members of two notorious gangs in Birmingham, the Burger Bar Boys [below] and the Johnson Crew.

The total cost to the public of these two gangs - as opposed to only the two families themselves - is thought to be nearly £190million. Both gangs became infamous in 2003 after two teenagers, Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare, were shot dead outside a New Year party in Birmingham during a gun battle between rival gangsters.

The £37million includes the cost of police investigations, lawyers, trials and prison for murders, attempted murders and serious injuries inflicted by three generations from the pair of gangster families. But it does not count the cost of medical care of victims, of undetected crimes by the same families, of their more minor crimes, or the cost in money or harm to their victims.

Nor does it take into account the state benefits claimed by the families, the education and extra teaching required by their children, their own burden on the NHS, or of providing them with council houses....

The Birmingham report said: 'The difficulty in penetrating and understanding gang culture makes it almost impossible for the indoctrinated to provide an informed view of what interventions will make a difference.' [A hangman would be completely effective]

The thug himself says so. Previous experience with the courts left him with no fear of the justice system

A YOUNG armed robber who slit a teenager's throat on a tram later said he'd wanted to eat his victim's heart, police say.

The 18-year-old also bragged on Facebook that he had been on bail at the time of the attack.

This week the teen, who cannot be identified because of his age, pleaded guilty to charges over his random attack on a 15-year-old boy. According to a police summary tendered before Melbourne Magistrates' Court, the boy told his victim he was the "king of Melbourne", saying: "I'm with (street gangs) MTS and LBK. "Don't start crying or I'll slit your throat." He then rummaged through the victim's school bag and his pockets, stealing items including a mobile phone and iPod nano.

"The accused then stood up, grabbed the left side of the victim's head with one hand and tilted his head exposing his neck," the summary says. "With his right hand, the accused ran the knife over the victim's neck cutting him from the left side of his neck to his chin, causing the victim to bleed.

The attacker later boasted on Facebook that he "had a stabbing and a robbery and assault pending. And I still got bailed. The dumb slut of a judge ha ha ha".

After Climategate and Glaciergate the UN (Mr. Ban Ki-Moon) and IPCC (R.Pachauri) have selected, who should investigate them. I wonder who Al Capone would have appointed to investigate him, if he had the chance, and what the results would have been? Probably similar.

Ban and Rajendra chose the InterAcademy Council and the InterAcademy Council established a 12 member investigation panel. The investigating panel is an interesting bunch of fellas. We have already heard rumours about some of them. This is probably the first attempt to asseses them all.

The list looks like they all met at some stinking rich UN reception with plenty of caviar and expensive vintage wine. All of them are CEOs or top managers. The nobility. I did not know, that being an independent and unbiased investigator requires one to be a VIP top manager?

After a brief respite to digest the “climategate” scandal and the IPCC's negligent acceptance of fraudulent claims about melting Himalayan glaciers, the SDN echo chamber of environmental propaganda has resumed in full form with the Peters-deBuys article of July 17. Such activists are trumpeting the recent spring increase of 0.1 C in average temperature while they completely ignored the previous decade decrease of 0.25 C.

The environmental propagandists are now back on message with their talking points in preparation for the Senate's consideration of an energy bill. The article is right about one thing: namely, that you should look at the data yourself; but not the eco-massaged data they recommend but rather the raw data as summarized in www.climate4you then click on May 2010.

The data show nothing particularly dramatic for the last several decades: temperatures, polar ice coverage, and sea level fluctuations that are all well within the range of normal variability. For more details, see my recent Café Scientifique talk on www.youtube.com and enter “climategate” and “hertzberg” in the search box. The data show that average Earth temperatures do not correlate with the recent increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and that neither of those quantities correlate in any way with the human emission of CO2 by fossil fuel combustion.

The entire theory that “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere can reradiate energy back to the Earth and thus cause more heating, has been proven to violate the laws of thermodynamics, and thus to be completely devoid of physical reality. Acceptance of that theory by some journals, scientific organizations, and government agencies both national and international, represents scientific malfeasance on a grand scale.

I mentioned the following report on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH recently and identified it just a bit of attention-seeking silliness. But a reader has pointed out that the "ritual" concerned is very reminiscent of Satanism, which, from what I hear, consists largely of mocking or "reversing" Christian ceremonies -- reciting the Lord's prayer backwards, for instance.

"American atheists lined up to be "de-baptized" in a ritual using a hair dryer, according to a report Friday on U.S. late-night news program "Nightline."

Kagin donned a monk's robe and said a few mock-Latin phrases before inviting those wishing to be de-baptized to "come forward now and receive the spirit of hot air that taketh away the stigma and taketh away the remnants of the stain of baptismal water."

Even the hot air could be seen as an allusion to the heat of hell. Being an atheist myself, I certainly don't believe that atheism generally leads to Satanism but there are possibly some weak minds who could be tipped in that direction by militant atheism.

Kagin and his "followers" could bear watching by those in a position to do so. "Cultbusters" occasionally do some good for badly misled people.

Kagin or Kagan is however usually a Jewish name so perhaps it is all just another example of Jewish contempt for Christianity (much seen in the ADL and to an extent in the ACLU. The ACLU is about a quarter Jewish and Jews are prominent in it). Most Jews are not religious in general and many are probably atheists.

We all know by now that early-age sex education has coincided with an increase in juvenile sexual activity but this would seem to positively encourage it

QUEENSLAND teachers have been told that all children "require opportunities to engage in developmentally appropriate sex and sexuality exploration".

A professional development series run by Education Queensland and Queensland Health, designed to help teachers cope with the growing problem, also questioned whether parents should be told about some incidents because of the distress it caused.

Child welfare group Bravehearts and the State Opposition claimed the information was "frightening" and "concerning" and came at a time of exponential growth in young children acting sexually towards their peers.

Former Education Queensland student services executive director Leith Sterling acknowledged some sexualised behaviour policies had been unclear and said Education Queensland was considering "embedding" protective behaviours in the curriculum.

Teachers were told experimental sexual play was normal but if a child could not be easily diverted, or had used aggression, it was a problem.

Prep children masturbating in class was considered to be developmentally appropriate given there was no concerning context. An example of two Prep children mutually taking part in the act prompted one health professional to ask teachers whether it was worth telling parents, if the children could be diverted from the activity.

The session was run last year with Education Queensland initially refusing to provide public access to it. Information was released only after a Right to Information application.

The department's policies have since come under question after it was revealed year one and two boys had allegedly performed sex acts on young girls at one state school which had 18 allegations of sexualised behaviour among pupils last year – 11 of them reported to police last year.

Education Queensland director-general Lyn McKenzie said there were systems in place to help staff deal with the issue and engage with parents on any incident where student welfare was a concern.

An Education Queensland spokesman said the claim that "all children require opportunities to engage in developmentally appropriate sex and sexuality exploration" was not the department's policy and "expert" opinion only.

But Bravehearts executive director Hetty Johnston said she found the statement frightening as the number of reported incidents was "growing exponentially".

This seems to be confirmation that her only response to immigration-driven population pressures on basic services will be to sent more migrants to plkaces outside the big cities -- a policy that did not work for Gough Whitlam -- see here and here -- and has no chance of working anywhere outside a totalitarian State

JULIA Gillard has refused to say whether she plans to cut back the migrant intake in line with her argument for a reassessment of population policy.

On Tuesday Ms Gillard said in a speech that the nation needed to ask itself whether it was time to stop packing more people into Sydney's western suburbs when the region's infrastructure and services were struggling to meet the demands of the existing population. In doing so she became the first prime minister in decades to question the notion that a growing population will drive economic growth and prosperity.

Asked on Sydney radio station 2UE today whether this meant she wanted to pare back the nation's immigration intake, Ms Gillard, a Welsh migrant, refused to be drawn. “I think that's a question not just about numbers but where they are going,” she said.

Ms Gillard said the issue was not as simple as simply putting up the house full sign in western Sydney. Instead, it was time for the nation to take pause and ensure communities had proper infrastructure and services and that growth happened where there were adequate services to cope with its impacts. “Let's just get it all right,” she said. “Let's have skilled migrants go where we need them.”

She said councils in western Sydney did not want “Just to see a rush to a big Australia” but that councils in other parts of the nation which suffered labour shortages were “crying out” for more people.

Daily Mail - Syria has banned face-covering Islamic veils from the country’s universities. The surprise move comes as similar moves in Europe – including controversial calls in Britain for a ban on burkas – have sparked cries of discrimination against Muslims. The crackdown was ordered by the secular government in Damascus amid fears of increasing Islamic extremism among young Muslim students.

I await throngs of leftists and their liberal bitches to gather outside the Syrian embassies denouncing this obvious and blatant racism by the Syrian government. After all, that's what they accuse anyone who dares to say anything about banning the beautiful Islamic veils here in the west, so the same should go for the Syrians, yes?

If true, this would close many (most?) Tea Party pages! As the 2010 U.S. "midterm" election gets nearer, Leftists are cracking down more and more on any opposition

"Facebook has sensationally banned the official Alex Jones Facebook page after a customer services representative admitted that all material containing images of the famous Gadsden flag was being deleted by the social networking giant.

While some fan pages remain up, the official Alex Jones Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/realalexjones has been terminated. Other Alex Jones pages run by Infowars readers have also been deleted, such as the page that was formerly at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Real-Alex-Jones/.

If Facebook has embarked on a policy of banning political expression and images it deems offensive then the company should be more open about the fact. While Facebook didn’t consider it necessary to delete a fan page dedicated to the British murderer Raoul Moat, it is now purging all material related to the Tea Party movement, states’ rights and the Gadsden flag, which is a symbol of resistance against tyranny and was originally used by the United States Marine Corps.

I am also pleased to say that I have just today acquired a large Gadsden flag which is now flying from the flagpole at the front of my house -- where I intend it to remain for the foreseeable future. I think the Gadsden flag is a good flag for libertarians as well as for tea-partiers, though those two groups probably do overlap to an extent anyway.

White Christian Britons are being unfairly targeted compared with minority groups for committing hate crimes, a new report says. The study from think-tank Civitas argues that new hate crime legislation is restricting freedom of speech, and has effectively introduced a new blasphemy law into Britain by the back door.

A foreword attached to the main report, “A New Inquisition: religious persecution in Britain today”, argues that prosecutors and police are unfairly singling out alleged crimes by white Christians, while ignoring other similar offences by minority groups.

It says: “Some police forces and the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] seem to be interpreting statutes in favour of ethnic and religious minorities and in a spirit hostile to members of the majority population, defined as ‘White’ or ‘Christian’.”

Report authors said it is “legitimate to ask” whether these agendas are being driven by “sectarian groups” within either police forces or inside the CPS.

It claims “there is evidence of biased application of the law”, citing the case of a Muslim man who sprayed the words “Islam will dominate the world – Osama is on his way” and “Kill Gordon Brown” on a war memorial in Burton-Upon-Trent.

He was prosecuted for criminal damage – “that is neither a racially nor a religiously aggravated offence”.

The CPS had argued that “the defacing the memorial did not attach to any particular racial or religious group” despite the fact that the monument was “a Christian and British memorial, carrying Christian and British symbols.

"People who read the story found themselves thinking that, if a non-Muslim had defaced a Muslim building the system would have thrown the book at him"...

'Econophysics' said to point the way to fair salaries in a free market

"A Purdue University researcher has used "econophysics" to show that under ideal circumstances free markets promote fair salaries for workers and do not support CEO compensation practices common today. The research presents a new perspective on 18th century economist Adam Smith's concept that an "invisible hand" drives a free market economy to a collective good.

"It is generally believed that the free market cares only about efficiency and not fairness. However, my theory shows that even though companies focus primarily on making profits and individuals are only looking out for themselves, the collective self-organizing free market dynamics, under ideal conditions, leads to fairness as an emergent property," said Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a professor of chemical engineering. "In reality, the self-correcting free market mechanisms have broken down for CEOs and other top executives in the market, but they seem to be working fine for the remaining 95 percent of employees."

A SYDNEY woman has been awarded a Supreme Court injunction to have her dead husband tested for a disease the Health Department says does not exist in Australia.

Mualla Akinci's husband, Karl McManus, died last Wednesday - three years after he was bitten by a tick she says carried Lyme disease, a bacterial infection which, if left untreated, can cause profound neurological damage.

Mr McManus, 43, from Turramurra, was bitten on the left side of his chest during filming for the television show Home and Away in bushland in Waratah Park, northern Sydney. Within six weeks he lost mobility in one of the fingers on his left hand. That quickly spread to paralysis in his left arm and across to his right arm.

Mr McManus was diagnosed with multifocal neuropathy after testing negative for Lyme disease, but Ms Akinci, a pharmacist, insisted he be tested again at clinics in the US and Germany. Both tests returned positive for Lyme disease.

She argues that Australian tests are inadequate because pathologists looks for antibodies in the blood, rather than for proteins in specific bacteria within tissue.

"Lyme doesn't usually live in the blood. It lives in tissues unless someone's system is flushed with it so it stands to reason that every test will come back negative," Ms Akinci said.

The Health Department maintains that no case has been transmitted in Australia and the organisms that cause it - three species of the genus borrelia - are not carried here by wildlife, livestock or their parasites....

People who are sceptical of climate change could soon be facing criminal charges in the European Court of Justice, British National Party leader and MEP Nick Griffin MEP has said.

Speaking in an exclusive Radio Red, White and Blue interview on this week’s “Eurofile” report, Mr Griffin told interviewer John Walker about a recent sitting of the European Parliament’s subcommittee dealing with the matter, which had passed a ruling which in effect placed legal sanction against anyone who dared question the origin, cause or effect of “climate change.”

Mr Griffin revealed how he could not get a straight answer out of the committee while it was in session, but that afterwards it was admitted to him that that intention of the rule was to criminalise dissension on the topic of “climate change.”

Listen to the full Radio RWB report by clicking here, choosing the RWB player launch icon and clicking on “Nick Griffin 14 July Brussels” in the pop-up menu.

Blind passengers are being ordered off buses or refused taxi rides because Muslim drivers or passengers object to their 'unclean' guide dogs. One pensioner, a cancer sufferer, told how had twice been confronted by drivers and asked to get off the bus because of his guide dog, and had also faced hostility at a hospital and in a supermarket over the animal.

The problem to carry guide dogs on religious grounds has become so widespread that the matter was raised in the House of Lords last week, prompting transport minister Norman Baker to warn that a religious objection was not a reason to eject a passenger with a well-behaved guide dog.

While drivers can use their discretion to refuse to carry non-disabled passengers with dogs, they are compelled to accept guide dogs under disability discrimination law.

Yesterday both the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the National Federation of the Blind confirmed the problem was common, and, according to the latter organisation was 'getting worse'.

The tension stems from a strand of Islamic teaching which warns against contact with dogs because the animal's saliva was considered to be impure, the Muslim Council of Britain said. It urged Muslims to show tolerance and common sense over the issue.

'We need to be flexible on this,' a spokesman said. 'Muslim drivers should have no hesitation in allowing guide dogs into their bus or car. 'If a dog does lick you, it's not the end of the world. Just go home and wash yourself.'

George Herridge, 73, a retired hospital maintenance manager, told the Daily Mail he was 'stunned' to be twice asked by bus drivers to leave their vehicles because of his guide dog Andy, a black Labrador.

Mr Herridge, who lives with wife Janet, 69, in Tilehurst, Reading, said that on the first occasion two years ago, he got off at the request of a Muslim driver because some Muslim children on board were 'screaming' because of the dog.

He found himself in a similar scenario in May last year, when a Muslim woman and her children became 'hysterical'. Mr Herridge this time refused the driver's request to alight. He complained to the bus company which launched an investigation. It later informed him the matter had been dealt with 'internally'.

Jill Allen-King, spokesman for the NFB, said she had been repeatedly left on the kerb by Muslim taxi drivers who refused to take her dog. One cab driver told her he would have to 'go home now and wash myself' when she tried to enter his car with her dog.

Mr Baker yesterday warned bus and cab companies that, while there were within their rights to ask a passenger to leave if the dog was causing a nuisance, it was 'much more questionable to be asked to remove a dog for religious reasons'. He added: 'One person's freedom is someone else's restriction.'

In 2006, Muslim minicab driver Abdul Rasheed Majekodumni was fined £200 and ordered to pay £1,200 costs by magistrates in Marylebone, central London, after being prosecuted for failing to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act when he refused to take a blind passenger because her guide dog was 'unclean'.

It was MEANT to! Those are some confused Canadians. Feminists just don't like good-looking women is what it is all about. Even PETA can't trump that hatred

"Pamela Anderson's racy new vegetarian advertisement for pressure group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was banned today in Canada for being "too sexist".

The New York Daily News said the animal rights ad features the 43-year-old Baywatch star posing in a blue string bikini with her body parts marked with labels including "rump", "breast" and "ribs" - accompanied by the slogan "All Animals Have the Same Parts".

Canadian officials rejected the campaign in Montreal at the 11th hour today claiming the ad went against the equal rights of men and women. "It is not so much controversial, as it goes against all principles public organisations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women," an official wrote in an email to PETA.

Here is one of those court decisions that make you think you might be dreaming because it defies common sense, but alas, a dream would have been more logical.

Aset Magomadova, a devout Muslim (I’m sure that had nothing to do with the decision) living in Calgary Canada, strangled her 14 year old daughter, Aminat, to death and received three years’ probation and a suspended sentence. That’s right, no jail time. The judge rejected the government’s request for a 12 year prison term (in itself a rather light sentence for killing a child), apparently the court felt that the mother didn’t intend to kill the girl, despite the fact that it would take several minutes for the child to die of strangulation and she would have had to keep pulling on the scarf she used long after the child stopped struggling to kill the girl. (You see, people tend to pass out before the actually die.) The mother claimed it was all in self defense when Aminat refused to go to court (Aminat had her own problems) and the 14 year old attacked the mother with a knife while she was peacefully praying. A knife was found, but oddly Aminat’s fingerprints were not on the knife. (I guess the child was such a clean person that she remembered to clean off the knife after she had been strangled.) Interestingly, the mother was able to wrap the scarf twice around the girl’s neck while Aminat was flailing at her with a sharp knife after she was surprised while praying to Allah. Does something seem wrong here, or is it just me?

Aset Magomadova leaves court after first day of sentencing. Since she kills children with scarfs; shouldn’t they at least prevent her from carrying deadly weapons in public.

Apparently, were supposed to feel compassion for the killer.

“Jennifer Koshan, an associate professor at the University of Calgary’s faculty of law who researches family violence, said the vast majority of fatal family violence cases involve husbands killing their wives.

“It’s relatively unusual to see a mother killing a child, especially an older child,” said Koshan. “So it’s rare for the court to be faced with this situation. Maybe that influenced the judge in his decision.”

So the fact that it is rare to “see a mother killing a child” (a lot less common in Muslim honor killings, remember the girl had a court hearing) is a mitigating factor now? I guess you should get away murder as long as you’re creative enough about it that its rare.

Marilyn Millions, one of Magomadova’s sponsors with St. James Anglican Church, said outside court she was relieved “at the compassion and mercy that has been shown” by the court.

“There were lots of tears and emotion,” she said. “If you’ve lived through it and you’ve gotten to know these people, it’s all in the context. It’s a lot different than reading a little bit about it. It’s a very different situation.”

Millions also said it was the wish of the family that “people would know mental-health services for young people and help for their families will be improved, and changes made to the system, so that others who have to go through similar situations do not fall through the cracks.”

There is something wrong with the Anglican Church and I think they are the ones who need mental health services. Not only are we to ignore the plain facts and let a murdering piece of s!$% go free without punishment, but we’re supposed to blame “mental-health services” for all of this. After all, we have to improve government assistance for these people because the murder would not have happened if the mental-health services were better. It therefore follows that it wasn’t the mother’s fault at all. I guess there is no such thing as personal responsibility.

The government plans on appealing the sentence. Good luck with that, given the state of the insane asylum that is the Canadian judicial system. Meanwhile, Aminat has been in the ground for three years, and the murderer got a good talking to, so I guess it’s all fair and just now.

About

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists. The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Some brief observations about Leftism

As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone. If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him. If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down. If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!) If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left.

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among people who should know better, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

“Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state – capitalism frees them.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were.

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in a MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

You can email me (John Ray) here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)